Do’s & Don’ts while writing a Meta Description

The meta description of blog/article is a snippet of up to 320 characters, a tag in HTML, that summarizes a page’s content. Search engines show the meta description in search results mostly when the searched for phrase is contained in the description. Optimizing the meta description is a very important aspect of on-page SEO.

Content should be structured

If you have a product for f.i. the tech-savvy, focussing on technical specs of the product could be a good idea. Manufacturer, SKU, price, things like that. If the visitor is specifically looking for that product, chances are you don’t have to convince him. Things like a price will trigger the click. Note that you could, of course, use rich snippets for this as well.

Characters restriction

There is no ‘this number is right’ in this. It depends on what Google adds to your search result and how much they want to show. Google might, for instance, add the date to an article, and that will reduce the number of characters. Recently, Google made changes to the length of search results snippets: 160 characters became up to 320. Following that, we changed the recommended meta description length in the plugin.

Actionable with active voice

Of course, it should. If you consider the description the invitation to the page, you can’t just make it “A mixed metaphor describing a non-existent, yet the implicitly high level of qualification.” That’s a dull I’ll explain using some examples later.

Unique meta description needed

If your description is a duplicate, the user experience in Google will be less. Although page titles might vary, all pages seem the same as all descriptions are equal. If you intentionally want/need/are enticed to create a duplicate description, you’d better leave the description empty and have Google pick a snippet from the page containing the keyword used in a search. Visit Google Webmaster Tools> HTML Improvements or use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to check for duplicate descriptions

A call-to-action

“Hello, we have such and such new product, and you want it. Find out more!” This overlaps the active voice, but I wanted to emphasize it. It’s your sales text, where your product is the page that is linked, not the product on that page.
Invitations like Learn more, Get it now, Try for free come to mind.

It should match the content

This is important. Google will find the description that tricks the visitor into clicking. It might even penalize the site that created the meta brief. Next, to that, it will probably increase bounce rate and is a bad idea just for that. You want the meta information to match the content on the page.

Proper keywords

If the search keyword matches text in the description, Google will be more inclined to use that content and highlight it in the search results. That will make the link more related